Up to date
This page is up to date for Godot 4.0.
If you still find outdated information, please open an issue.
Internal rendering architectureΒΆ
This page is a high-level overview of Godot 4's internal renderer design. It does not apply to previous Godot versions.
The goal of this page is to document design decisions taken to best suit Godot's design philosophy, while providing a starting point for new rendering contributors.
If you have questions about rendering internals not answered here, feel free to
ask in the #rendering channel of the
Godot Contributors Chat.
Note
If you have difficulty understanding concepts on this page, it is recommended to go through an OpenGL tutorial such as LearnOpenGL.
Modern low-level APIs (Vulkan/Direct3D 12) require intermediate knowledge of higher-level APIs (OpenGL/Direct3D 11) to be used effectively. Thankfully, contributors rarely need to work directly with low-level APIs. Godot's renderers are built entirely on OpenGL and RenderingDevice, which is our abstraction over Vulkan/Direct3D 12.